i'm not going to lie. numbers make me feel good. it's proof of what i have done, and what i have accomplished. and sometimes, proof of what i havn't done enough of. lol! i make guesses all the time. not necessarily educated guesses. just pulling random numbers that sound about right, out of my head. so it's nice sometimes to actually go and check the numbers.
when i check in on my blog each day, i check my stats page. i can see how many views i have on a daily basis, and where they're coming from. it even has a graph line. when that line dips low (usually on the weekends), i wonder why no one is reading my blog that day. when that line goes up high, i wonder what i've done that is making people read my blog that day (and hope that it was something good, and not some drama. lol!). it shouldn't matter to me how many people check my blog. i know that. but i like to know that people like what i'm sharing, enough to keep coming back. therefore, making me want to blog more. makes sense, right?
so of course, i had to check how many times i've blogged this year. and i was impressed with myself. this is my 235th post of the year. out of 365 days, that's not bad at all. and here is my goal for the next few months, or at least next year. is to get the last two years of my blog printed through blurb into my little 7×7 hardcover books. i love that set of books shown above, that equal 2.5 years of blogging. but i've slacked on doing them since then. so i have 2008 and 2009 to get done.
i don't use these post bound albums anymore. but i still like the photo (taken of all the daycare kids albums as of 2 years ago), and it represents all the layouts i do, just for this story-telling post. i remember at the end of last year, i was looking at what i had scrapped that year. and i realized that i had scrapped more layouts of the daycare kids and friends, than i had scrapped my girls and our own family. that didn't seem right to me. i love the daycare kids more than anything, and also love to scrap friends of the family. it gives me variety, and lots of cute faces to choose from when i'm scrapping. from looking through my blog and my laptop, i counted 29 daycare/friends layouts for this year. and another 2 that i can't share yet. so 31 layouts is still pretty good.
but when you get right down to it, i should be focusing on my own family more and getting our memories down. so that's exactly what i set out to do this year. i still scrapped the other kids and friends of ours. but i made a big effort to put more focus on my girls and my family. i made a big point to scrap a lot of random things, that maybe i wouldn't have scrapped before. i always looked for family photos to use first and foremost, when it came time to work on projects and assignments. and it shows. from looking through my blog and my laptop, i counted 82 family layouts, and another 19 that i can't share yet. HELLO. that's 101 layouts in the last year!!! just for my own family. that's huge.
on top of all that, i had a ton of projects i did for assignments. oddles of cards, altered items, smaller sample layouts, and even pillowcases and tshirts. i'm not going to count those. i know they're all there. and i know it was a lot. but there are some big personal projects that i feel are worth mentioning and patting myself on the back for.
i took on project 365 this past year, from becky higgins. the concept of taking a photo a day, and putting it into one meaningful album that really shows a look at your year. i LOVE the concept more than anything. to me, i wanted it to be a way to get all the little things captured. things around the house, places we go, things we do. just random little tidbits that make up our life. i have 5 months of this album completely and totally done. i shared most of those pages during the first few months of the year. then i got a little behind. i have a lot of photos in there for the other months. just a matter of filling in the empty spots and catching up my journaling cards. but it's still do-able, and i'm determined to finish it. becky has another kit for this coming year, called project life. i ordered one and it's on it's way to me. not totally sure how i'm going to use it, but i'll keep you informed on what i do.
another big project that i did this year, was putting together the girls school albums. i had the school KOTM's from becky higgins, that i had stashed away for quite a while. finally took them out and spend about two weeks organzing and assembling my albums. this photo shows 4 albums (2 for alyssa, 2 for sarah), but i ended up with 6 albums total (3 for alyssa, and 3 for sarah). you can see more of my albums HERE. i'm so glad i took the time to get these put together. i still have some work to do within the albums, for each year. but they hold all the papers, projects, report cards, class photos, id cards, awards, etc. and everytime i get one of these things, it goes directly into the album. so it's already making my life easier, just having the system set up.
another project i worked on this year, was my "things we do" albums. i hesitate to call these "vacation albums", since we don't really go on actual vacations. lol! but there are some trips in there, and a lot of day trip type stuff. this took me a few weeks, and i have most of our trips from the last 5 years in three albums total. you can see more about these HERE. and i even re-did an entire 40+ page disney album, into just 7 pages, that i added to my "things we do" album. you can see that HERE.
and this photo isn't really related to this post. but i'm not about to go take a photo at this hour. i came across this one while digging out all the other photos, and i thought i looked so happy here. and knowing that i accomplished so much scrapping this past year makes me feel this happy. i also look pretty much just like this right now. i'm wearing the same hoodie, the same glasses, sitting in the same chair, with the same hairstyle. so that's convenient. i also just happen to have been listening to the soundtrack of this same movie, the entire time i was typing up this post. you all know it's my favorite and at the top of my ipod list! no lie there. you want proof that i'm the biggest "high school musical" fan?
i created that layout over a year ago. love it! not sure how this worked it's way into my post. rofl! the randomness that is my mind. it's a funny thing somtimes 😉
Laura Vegas 
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